Employers, as well as persons seeking jobs, typically want to know how much compensation is appropriate and/or how much others in similar situations are paid. The compensation may take many forms such as base pay, bonus pay, stock, stock options, incentives, benefits (e.g., medical, dental, optical, etc.), and perquisites. How much and in what form a person will be compensated is typically a driving influence in whether the person is interested in obtaining and continuing in a particular job. Thus, compensation information is often desired by individual persons seeking jobs and entities offering jobs.
Data regarding compensation from which a person can accurately assess the compensation provided for a particular job is often not available. For example, while compensation data reporting companies exist, employers may not provide compensation data to these companies at all, or not for a particular job of interest to an employer or a job seeker. Further, data may not be available for positions in a particular region that the seeker is interested in, or for the size of organization, the particular job, or the industry sought by the job seeker. Also, while compensation data may be available, there may be so few matching or relevant data points that the user is unable to determine what compensation should be expected.